Framing Entrepreneurship Support Policies in Entrepreneurship Education: Evidence From a Randomized Controlled Trial

This study examines whether different ways of presenting policy information within an educational setting influence students’ entrepreneurial intentions. Drawing on the Theory of Planned Behavior, we conducted a randomized pre-test/post-test experiment involving 191 advanced undergraduate students at Uruguay’s largest private university. Students were assigned to one of three interventions: factual descriptions of entrepreneurship support instruments, narratives from entrepreneurs who had successfully benefited from these policies, or a combination of both. Policy descriptions alone did not significantly influence entrepreneurial intentions or their antecedents. In contrast, exposure to role-model narratives significantly increased entrepreneurial intentions, while combining narratives with policy information produced the largest, though not significantly stronger, effect. These findings suggest that entrepreneurship education can function as a mechanism through which entrepreneurship support policies become cognitively accessible and socially meaningful to prospective entrepreneurs. The study contributes to entrepreneurship education by explaining how institutional information enters the entrepreneurial intention formation process through different communication formats, while also complementing entrepreneurship policy research with an ex-ante perspective on policy communication.